Our overseas trip 2004

Currently working on the section of our site that deals with our recent overseas trip. It will be a long term work in progress I suspect. The image editing is a time consuming process in itself. Serves us right for taking over a gigabytes worth of images I guess?

I love my computer/s

Just get a Mac and be done with it.

This article while not originally *by* J Kottke, makes me laugh all the same!

Thong season arrives!

Given the weather today, I think I can safely say.............it's thong season!

That's the shoe variety - chinese work boots, you know!

Still life, with minor edits in photoshop

Why make images?

As the year draws to a close here, I have been reflecting a bit on my own creative practices ( I don't need the end of a year for this, at the best of times, but hey let's use it as an excuse anyway). I am a bit embarassed to admit that I have spent less time in the darkroom at home this year than any other year in the last 15 or so. However I still am making images as prolifically as ever, it's just that the change in approach brought about by digital cameras means a different end result or use for these images is required. Shock horror perhaps even a different intention or maybe more focused attention is what is required?

When we were on our honeymoon in New Zealand a couple of years ago, why I made images with a camera was really driven home. A question that I still am struggling with. Why do I take/make images? What do I do with them all, who really benefits from these thousands of images? I realised at the time that particularly in an unfamiliar environment with little time to spare it was almost pointless trying to make god or meaningful images with any kind of idea behind them. I gave up pretty quickly trying to make anything that resembled art to me and just snapped away making what I hoped would be good/memorable pictures of the trip as a whole, and if I fluked a good one then so be it.

Well here I am 2 or 3 years later and things haven't changed that much, I am still making images albeit more digital than any other kind and I just wonder what am I supposed to do with. As an aside when I retired my Kodak DC 260 halfway through our recent world trip I had reached the 13,000 mark they are all carefully filed away on CD awaiting a reason to be pulled out and used.

The reason I'm thinking this way is that making images with a digital camera IS different to using an analog camera. Technical issues aside there is an underlying attitude that kind of devalues the image. The instant feedback provided by digital photography has taken away a lot of the mystery of the process. This loss of mystery equates perhaps to a loss of innocence or maybe a lowering of expectations of what we can achieve with our images. For example, I always set my camera to its highest possible resolution with the least amount of compression available to me - "just in case, I want to make a nice large print from the file". In 5 or so years of using a digital camera I have never once seriously bothered to make a print from them. So why do I maintain this just in case mentality? Why can't l let it all go and simply get used to the idea of making images for a computer screen?

Applications such as Director which are powerful story telling tools require you to have a firm understanding of the story you want to tell? (Director can turn still images into interactive images that move, based on a story of some sort.) Do I have story to tell? Particularly given the way I make digital images in a kind of Gary Winnogrand style- what would "that" look like photographed - kind of way? A self published book is one option, still awaiting exploration, and I am truly enjoying the galleries over at Flickr.com too. Ultimately I guess that so long as I continue to make images that are important to me then maybe someone will get some value from them?

Two photographs - minimal photoshop editing

Victoria street Blues?

Picture this, it's a mild sunny morning, you're sitting in a cafe having a coffee, reading a book, in particular a book of Jack Kerouac Poems. You realise that you have actually got a recording of Alan Ginsberg reading one these poems. You can "hear" the poem and you slip off into the street in front of you. The traffic moves and hums, a woman's heels click click past you on the pavement, the sun shines. You finish your coffee and read some more:-

"...In the feel of their stride
Touching to hide the sidewalk,
Blackshiny lastnight parlor
Shoes hitting the slippery
With hard slicky heels
To slide and fall:
Breboac! Karrak!"

You return your cup to the counter inside walk across the street, after braving the peak hour traffic, hop in your car and look back at the red building bathed in morning light that houses the coffee shop, and read the sign on top.

It reads - Wayne Wong and Associates.

As an aside the excerpt from the Jack Kerouac poem, "SanFrancisco Blues", is reproduced here without permission.

Simple icon software for the Mac

More nifty software! Now I can make really cool icons for my Mac. All it takes is a simple bit of photoshop editing and then dropping the image on the software, hey presto a nice custom made icon.

Is Google the only answer?

Currently trying this search engine. It's called cluster and turns up some interesting results - quickly.

See my links to the right, for the reason why I am thinking of switching?

Let X-mas Begin!

In town today, and of course the silly season has officially begun! The crowds were surprisingly quiet for the first day of the "Myer Windows". Snapped up a few CD's today as well. Some might say an eclectic list, other folks, just know me and my tastes.

• "Closing Time", Tom Waits
• "Used Songs 1973-1980", Tom Waits
• The Best of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
• "Amelie" Film soundtrack
• "If I should Fall from Grace with God", The Pogues
• "Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death", The Dead Kennedys
• "Unknown Pleasures", Joy Division
• "Apollo Atmospheres and Soundtracks", Brian Eno
• "You Don't Know Me", Dannielle Gaha
• "Scar", Missy Higgins

More images of Melbourne over at Flickr

Art banned in Darwin

Coffs Harbour hosts banned photo exhibition. A photo art show that was banned in Darwin is opening tonight at the Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery on the NSW mid-north coast. The Northern Territory Parliament banned a scheduled exhibition in March of Belinda Mason-Lovering's collection called Intimate Encounters, Disability and Sexuality. The ban sparked an outcry from one of the models with disabilities, former ABC reporter Cath Duncan, who says she thought it was a joke at first. Tonight's opening also has a local contribution from sculptor John Van der Kolk, a collection inspired by the visual memories of blind people. Ms Duncan says it is a poignant and moving exhibition. "I'm quite hardened. I've seen a lot of disabled art and photography, but I walked out of there in tears," she said. "It moves you to really get an insight into how somebody else with a different sort of body and different senses views themselves. It's all about identity, sexuality and all that personal stuff. It's very beautiful."

Taken from the ABC arts site

Pictures on Waferbaby

Just had an image loaded on Waferbaby.

CMA graduate show 2004

Opening tonight, the graduating student's show 28 k, from CMA at Victoria Universtiy, here are the sites they built as part of the unit of study they undertook with me.

Colour tools?

Nice little colour generating tool, lot's of them out there, this ones very elegant

Thanks to Ed for the heads up

Pet peeves whinge number #041111

One of my main peeves in life is the way we are pigeon holed by advertisers and marketers, this article on wired throws some light on the the issue and also gives some hope.

[Wired News]A PBS documentary makes the case that Americans have tuned out marketers pitching everything from cars to candidates. The result: even more crass attempts to get through, and a fragmentation of American society. By Jason Silverman.

Bush salutes us - NOT!

Finally G. W. Bush reveals his true feelings about the rest of the world.

Berencie Abbot and Eugene Atget

The article below, on Berenice Abbot from about.com, mentions one of my early favourites Eugene Atget. A street photographer who never saw himself as an artist, but has been elevated to that status for many years. The trouble is, his work to my mind, takes a lot - and I mean, a lot, of close inspection and reflection to see that. The problems begin I guess, if you use the yard stick of "what is the function of this work" as a means to measure the work. Even though the work indeed was used by Atget to sell to Museums and other artists as either reference pieces or documents if you like, it somehow moves beyond mere documentation. One extra factor in Atget's favour is of course the fact that the majority of the imagery is of a place that no longer exists, pre-war Paris of the early 1900's.

Personally I like his work, I can connect to it on many levels and it's always a pleasure to look at. I have of course read several tomes about him and his work, so my understanding of where he's coming from maybe different to someone discovering him for the first time. This is what I like about this article, it gives a teaser and links and allows the reader to explore more in their own fashion based on their needs and desires, a very handy function of the web.

Enjoy the article and the links.

Berenice Abbott's own place in the history of photography is sometimes overshadowed by the work she did in bringing the work of one of the greatest of all photographers, Eugene Atget, to the public eye. After his death in Paris, she bought much of the work from his studio, and brought it back with her to New York where she exhibited and published it. In his lifetime, Atget had sold large numbers of prints of aspects of Paris to various museums as well as to individuals, including artists such as Man Ray, but had not generally been recognised as a significant artist. Although his work was written about in Europe, it was the collection in New York (later at MoMA) that made him a well-known name in photography. Abbott took many fine portraits, but her work on the city of New York is her finest monument You can see a good selection from this at the Hacklebury Gallery in London until January 29, 2005. Also on the gallery site are some other interesting images of New York, including work by Ted Croner, Elliott Erwitt and Arthur Leipzig

I am so inspired by some of the work I am seeing on Flikr that I am planning on spending the day out and about with my camera, seeing what I can, so stay tuned for a big update either here or at flickr, or my own site - oh and there is the travelogue as well.

For both my readers I wish to share the latest gem of software I have picked up from the internet, it's called Quicksilver and it is a useful and free utility for speeding up access to the contents of your Macintosh computer, bypassing the need for the dock, which for me had become painfully slow and time consuming. I am still learning it's intricacies but within minutes of downloading and installing last night, I am already opening and closing documents and files quickly with nothing more than a couple of keyboard strokes. A very useful tool indeed. The application's website will of course migrate over to the right with all the other interesting stuff I've found. One thing I neglected to mention was the quality and standard of work over at flickr, unlike other sites i've seen out there in cyber space this one is populated by people who are not onlt talented but also able to "see" wit their cameras in away that makes the world an interesting place again, go check it out.

my desktop 08/11/04

Changes are some what infrequent on my laptop, but as I'm sick of fiddling with the dock I've gone back to the old system of the alias on the desktop

my desktop 08/11/04,
originally uploaded by s2art.

Flikr and photo-sharing

I have been hanging around flickr now for almost 3 days! Unheard of in this era of nano-second attention spans. Admittedly I have been adding tons of my own images, from my own site, but also busy adding tags (to my shots) and making contacts, and commenting on these contacts' work as well.

This site really interests me. It allows the user to upload and store their own photos these can then be organised into galleries, and set for public or private viewing, tags allowing sharing of common galleries. You can also set up galleries of images with images that are cross related, this is a fab idea and allows any user to organise threads and connections within their own bodies of work. So when another user browses a gallery they can then see the other connections made by the original maker of the images.

Macs are a tool afterall?

Here's one for the all macophobes out there, if they can stop playing their 3rd person shoot 'em ups long enough to read it -and - think about it